An owl flies down from the sky with the usual eerie quietness, flapping down to perch on the windowsill. Attached to its claws is a letter, sealed in red wax, tied up in a felty bow. 

It pecks gently at the frame of the window, and makes a soft owly cry. 

That's new. Owls carrying letters. She's never seen that before.

Well, might as well see what it says. She reaches out slowly. "I'm gonna take the letter, okay?" If it holds still, she'll carefully untie the letter and sit back down, opening it.

It bobs its head down, an almost condescending look on its face, staying still as she unwraps the letter. 

Dear Miss Hailey Harper, 

I hope this letter finds you well. We at the F.I.X.F.I.C. Agency have a job opportunity for you that we believe that you may be interested in. Contrary to what you might have expected, the multiverse is both quite real and quite accessible, with the right technology or 'magic'. Naturally, this both means that there are all the more problems to solve, and all the more options for how to solve them.

The F.I.X.F.I.C. Agency are but one amongst many groups that has access to multiversal travel and the fruits thereof. Our mission is to ensure the thriving of sapient life, with an especial focus on inserting our empowered agents into worlds undergoing great peril to 'fix' the arc of their world into something brighter and better. You in particular have been identified as likely to be especially compatible with both our empowerment methodologies and our missions. 

The job is far from an easy one, but we have millennia of experience shepherding and supporting would-be heroes, and a broad selection of benefits available for those willing to undertake the task. 

If you wish to speak with us in more detail about joining us, please tear the enclosed talisman, which will transport you to one of our bases, where you will be fully briefed and offered a selection of abilities and missions to undertake. Unfortunately, due to security considerations, a further explanation of those details cannot be included here, but rest assured that even if you decline, the worst that could happen would simply that you return to your life as it was before. 

If you wish to decline, simply discard or destroy the letter, and we shall trouble you no more. 

Agent Braveheart
F.I.X.F.I.C. Office f182b0

All preceding content is hereby certified to be true and accurate to the best of the knowledge of the F.I.X.F.I.C. organization, to be designed for honest and open communication, and to contain no geas, pact, glamour, enchantment or similar working, nor any supertechnological or esosteric enhancements to alter effective persuasiveness or the circumstances of reception, beyond your identification as an adequate potential and a discernment of minimum availability to read the contents of the letter. If you have any complaints about the manner or contents of this communication, please either discard this letter or report your concerns to Sapient Resources at your earliest convenience. 

What.

That's an impossible offer, but how do they know that name? There is literally no one other than herself who knows that name. And the letter was delivered by a trained owl. 

Bloody hell. This shite can't be real, but testing it costs her basically nothing. She throws some tools in a sling bag, along with a notebook, some pens and pencils, her phone and a charger, and puts on a pair of shoes.

Damn it all.

She tears the talisman.

There's a brief moment of the feeling of being nowhere in particular, then something indescribable and imperceptible - 

The place that she reappears is almost insultingly normal. It's a comfy office, with teak wallpanels and neutral brown rugs. Before her sits a black-stained wooden desk, with a desktop setup set off to the side and a refined Japanese woman wearing a pale blue cheongsam, sitting with her hands folded between her thighs. Just aside where she appeared, there's a sinfully soft recliner, a quiet invitation to sit, if she'd like.   

She arches an eyebrow and doesn't sit yet. "How do you know that name?"

"That information is produced as a byproduct of the fundamental operation of the potential identification system. As a courtesy, the most preferred referent is divined and used in internal and external communications and records where practical." 

Her voice is gentle and smooth, pleasingly lilting yet slightly clipped. 

"Huh."

She sits.

"So what're the details, and do the benefits include transition help?"

"One augmentation included as standard for all of our agents is a body redesign within the scope of the plausible for your species, which may be kept freely after your mission. If you have transition goals not compatible with that limitation, then we'll need to look a little further afield." 

Her lips purse for a brief moment. 

"We monitor a certain 'area' within the multiverse for places that we have the capacity to travel to and where an intervention of someone sufficiently skilled and well-equipped could make a significant difference to continued well-being of sapient beings. To that end, we empower agents for the duration of their missions with some combination of skill downloads, physical and magical augmentations, and equipment in order to remedy the situation. A large portion of our work is dominated both by the limitations imposed by 'cosmic balance', differing physical and metaphysical laws and ordinary resource constraints. To help operationalize those constraints, we use the internal currency of 'tokens' to denote the extent of mission resources available for our agents in a given world, and 'boons' to reflect the extent of our capacity to improve you and your circumstances outside of the context of a mission." 

She reaches out her hand, and turns the second monitor to show her the contents of the screen, and slides a keyboard and mouse over for navigation of the page. 

"Here is a preliminary listing, if you wish to peruse it yourself. Alternatively, I am available to answer any further questions you may have." 

She starts flipping through the available enhancements and equipment. "Hell of a list. I see skill downloads on here, what happens to those after a mission?"

"Without other powers, you completely lose the 'instinct for excellence', the 'database' features, and all associated metaphysical support for supernatural performance. In terms of the mundane skill itself, while it doesn't rip out things that you've learned on top of the download or your memories of using the skills, it's almost always reported that even exercised skills are essentially universally remembered more like something that you remember hearing a description of, rather than particularly usefully formatted procedural knowledge." 

"Mm. Well, it's at least a headstart on recovering it in downtime. What's the pay like?"

She tilts her head slightly. 

"Mission success is rewarded with Boons, as laid out in each mission profile. Would a sample mission profile be helpful? Boons can be converted into a number of rewards, such as those listed here. Generally, those are considerably more valuable then similar boon expenditures towards financial offerings, but if you have a particular desire for that, I can send an inquiry to Fulfillment as to what they can offer on that front." 

"Boons sound great, and I probably prefer them to money in most cases, with the sole caveat that they don't directly pay for my flat, and this job would likely conflict with my old one."

She nods acknowledgingly.

"Due to the nature of our preferred multiversal travel methods, it can be easily arranged for no time to have passed in your absence, or for you to be put back at a later date of your choice, so that isn't necessarily an issue." 

She hums a bit more. "I hate being untransitioned at the job more than I hate working as a mechanic itself, so I don't mind thinking of it as a cover job of sorts. On the other hand, the kinds of missions you're talking about sound like the kind of thing that agents need downtime between every so often for mental health reasons, and working a day-joy does not precisely count as a relaxing holiday. Some minor degree of mundane pay could be useful if just to enable that."

"A moment please." 

She types at her own keyboard for a moment, before nodding approvingly. 

"For one boon point, I can get you a hundred thousand pounds, and for two one million and three a hundred million. Another popular option is to take the immigration boon, which comes with sufficient resources for a comfortable livelihood at your destination. Please note we also offer a few days stay and counselling at the conclusion of missions as part of the debriefing process, and that's enough rest for many." 

Her eyes widen a touch at the sums. "That'll do it. I suppose that's enough to see y'all have sufficient resources and rewards, and really specifics are hard to decide without knowing what I'm up against. What missions are available to me?"

"A considerable number. In general, I'd advise focusing on lower token value worlds - an exponential increase in mission difficulty is often associated with only a relatively linear increase in token allotment. While the power of the higher token cost options somewhat makes up for that, that problem generally remains. Here is a selection of missions, now queued and available for you."

She shows the list, with options sorted by point cost ending at the 50 point options with a message printed below.

60+ token missions require additional screening and special dispensation to undertake, due to elevated risks. 

She carefully picks through the list. "The Flashpoints mission set looks promising as an introduction. In particular I like the smaller and more flexible set of objectives."

She smiles faintly. 

"I'm glad. Many agent candidates note that the scope and responsibility of other missions is rather overwhelming for them. Sadly, the specific circumstances that enable this type of mission appear to be relatively rare." 

"Guess I'm lucky there's one for my first round, then. 'Course now that means I have to pick an order and an initial loadout." She looks over the list of crises. "Probably the thing to do is to put them in an order that uses similar capabilities, shooting missions next to each other for example. How flexible are your insetion points?"

"You should be able to appear more or less anywhere not inside the threshold of a building or home unless the space is warded against dimensional travel within a few AU of the crisis point. In terms of time, we can send you later then the time indicated relatively easily, but earlier is almost entirely infeasible. If you have something specific in mind that would benefit from a small degree of additional flexibility, I can see if it can be arranged at a reasonable token cost."

She nods, getting out a notebook and pen. Each mission gets two pages of its own. She breaks each page into two sections, for a total of four: Threat Model, Solution Models, Outstanding Questions, and Resource Priorities.

As she flips back and forth between the individual missions and writes down questions, speaking up every so often with a few.

"Okay, for Kira and Ryuk, it's been a while since I've read or watched Death Note. Has Kira recruited Misa yet and given her the name-identifying eyes? For that matter, which name is relevant here, my chosen name or my deadname? And how close to Naomi can you get me, and can I have a photo and coordinates of someplace secure and close to L and the task force?"